The QAT: A Qualitative Algebra Toolkit

Jean-François Condotta (1) , Gérard Ligozat (2) , Mahmoud Saade (1)

1 UA - Université d'Artois
2 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur

Representing and reasoning about spatial and temporal information is an important task in many applications of Artificial Intelligence. In the past two decades numerous formalisms have been proposed for representing and reasoning about time and space using qualitative constraints. In the first part of this paper we propose and study a general definition of such formalisms by considering calculi based on basic relations of an arbitrary arity. In a second part we describe the QAT (Qualitative Algebra Toolkit), a JAVA constraint programming library allowing to handle constraint networks based on those qualitative calculi. The main motivation of this work stems from the fact that most software tools dealing with qualitative calculi have only been implemented for specific qualitative calculi.

Mots clés: consistency; qualitative constraint network; spatial and temporal reasoning; Java programming; software tools

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Linguistique

Jean-François Condotta, Gérard Ligozat, Mahmoud Saade. The QAT: A Qualitative Algebra Toolkit. 2nd IEEE International Conference on Information Technologies , Apr 2006, Damascus, Syria. pp.3433 - 3438, ⟨10.1109/ICTTA.2006.1684969⟩. ⟨hal-01434027⟩